Gonna hope getting to the ending without revisiting what I assume was the hub is still intentional, otherwise I think I skipped a bit of the game. Gonna check out what I missed later though, this was a fun little concept!
It sort of is? It's part of the intended path, but you're only meant to notice you can do it after seeing a clue. Unfortunately, quite a lot of people realized without the clue. I intended to do another hotfix that just displays a message if you get to the ending sequence early, just saying "it looks like you did a sequence break" or something, but itch's servers didn't let me upload it in time :/